Shawn had been lurking in the next room, and came out as soon as Isabelle had left. Jordan didn't look too proud when he answered, staring at void in the mid-distance. "She said she wanted to be good, do good things."
The uncertainty in Jordan's expression was unsettling, on a man who used to always be so sure of himself. "But you didn't believe her, right?" There was a hint of incredulity mixed with the relief in Shawn's voice.
Jordan kept silent and was still not meeting his eyes. If this sudden unease was about ridding them of Isabelle, Shawn wasn't going to let him feel bad about it. "You did us all a service, Jordan. She wouldn't listen to anyone. Not me, not Richard... What'd you tell her?"
"I told her," Jordan drew in a breath and jerked his chin up a notch, the added solemnity a marked somber note in his tone, "I told her she could never change."
"Is that what you saw?"
Jordan gave an empty scoff at Shawn's earnest questioning. "No." He was shaking his head now, allowing himself to really look at Shawn and Shawn alone. He hadn't had time, when Baldwin's wife did her trick, to appreciate what the kid could do to him; time to take it in, measure it, make any sense of it at all.
"Well, what did you see?"
It was happening now, and the high almost made Jordan smile, but it was a half-grin tainted with... vertigo? Maybe fear. "She stayed with you," he said, because he was done lying for this lifetime. "She didn't stand in the way."
"Alright," Shawn nodded. "So," he wasn't sure what to say anymore, he wasn't even sure he had cared for any answer, but he blindly put his faith in Jordan, "what happens now?" Like always.
For once, not even Jordan had any precise idea. It could go ten thousand different ways from there. Shawn believing him was the only quasi-certainty. "I don't know." They're words Jordan wasn't used to saying, and his voice almost faltered, but no, he managed to keep it level.
He remembered Shawn's hands on him. Could still feel them radiating warmth and clutching at his shirt, not wanting to let go.
"I've missed you," the boy said with another sigh of relief. Jordan had never meant to deceive, never intended to leave him.
He could still hear the screams from when he collapsed under the rain of bullets; the loudest ones, the most distressed, distinctly Shawn's.
He had to say it quick, before the images blurred with his own confused memories, because he owed Shawn the truth. He owed every one. "Isabelle made you happy."
The kid just wouldn't hear it. "No, she didn't," he shook his head. "I didn't even want to get married."
And it was endearing how convinced he was, but Jordan had seen, and the twinge of sadness belied only (maybe) by his eyes had to be far more convincing. "No, Shawn," it left no room for debate. "She made you happy."
Shawn was shaking his head still, and his lips were twisted in a shape that let Jordan appreciate how absurd he thought all of this was. "Damnit, Jordan! You'll make me happier."
He had seen his picture in the paper a few times, most of them on the same pages he saw his own, and that was where he learnt both their names. Days ago, that was all he knew of Shawn Farrell: a face and a name. They hadn't meant much, then.
Now, he remembered it all, how the boy dedicated himself to the cause, how much he had trusted him; and most of all, how his presence filled him with what felt like endless hope.
Shawn's words still echoed in the stretching silence, and if Jordan hadn't acknowledged them yet, it was because nothing he should have said in response seemed to make any real sense. What he wanted didn't matter, and he wasn't even sure what that was.
But the boy was taking tentative steps forwards, towards him, and Jordan caught himself fighting an imperceptible smile. It boggled his mind. All this time wandering, walking the ever-hostile worlds and wading through oceans of doubt so deep, wondering who he was, where he was meant to be, what he was meant to do; the answer couldn't be so simple.
He had thousands, maybe millions of followers now - he couldn't let them see weakness in him; but one mattered more than all of them together, because he couldn't remember if and when before he had felt such an overpowering sense of home.
The hesitant squeeze he felt brought him out of his thoughts; the hands resting on his back, the whispers just below his ear as Shawn repeated, "You make me happier," and Jordan couldn't tell if those were sobs shaking the boy, or if he was just giggling in silence.
As he hugged back and held on, the pictures in the paper still didn't mean much. They faded, like he suspected many other things eventually would. He didn't clear his throat before speaking, and so his voice was a little hoarse when he said, "I hope I will, Shawn. I hope."
Change had been initiated, the fight begun, and nothing appeared so clear and sure to Jordan anymore; but Shawn was holding onto him for dear life, now; and this intimacy, at once new and familiar, it was suddenly everything. Endless hope. It was all he had anymore, and it was enough, because it meant everything, now.